Back Issues: Chloe Sevigny

On “Fresh Air” today, host Terry Gross interviews actress Chloe Sevigny. In the course of the interview, they touch on “Chloe’s Scene,” Jay McInerney’s 1994 profile of the then nineteen-year-old Sevigny. Before she became the star of such films as “The Last Days of Disco,” “American Psycho,” and “Zodiac,” the Connecticut-born Sevigny was the downtown “girl of the moment.” McInerney accompanied her as she made her way among lower Manhattan’s clubs, boutiques, and restaurants, describing Sevigny as “a roving ambassador without portfolio” to the interconnected tribes of hip-hop, rave, indie rock, and skateboarding. McInerney detected a certain canniness in Sevigny’s seemingly arbitrary decisions, such as when she blew off a shoot for Italian Vogue with photographer Stephen Meisel:

To call Chloe elusive is an understatement: contacting her is a matter of triangulation—calling friends, calling her parents, calling Liquid Sky, the boutique where she’s been working for the past year. When an appointment is made, it’s not always kept, particularly if it’s before afternoon. And when you find Chloe—when she’s right there, sitting across the table from you at Jerry’s or Odessa, in a tight black sweater she bought in Darien for three dollars embroidered with French expressions like “Affaire de Coeur” and “Cherchez la Femme”—you may find yourself still looking for her, looking for something more. It’s a neat trick to be able to suggest hidden reserves—to be a tabula rasa and seem to be the Dead Sea Scrolls—and Chloe’s friends all eventually allude to this sense that she is holding back. “She just sits there,” says her friend, Rita Ackerman, a Budapest-born artist, “but she controls the whole scene. That’s her charisma.”